Richard Cohen: Losing his head in Crimea

By Richard Cohen

Posted:
03/04/2014 08:25:03 AM PST

Updated:
03/04/2014 04:54:26 PM PST

Vladimir Nabokov considered Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog" one of the best short stories ever written. For what it's worth, I agree. The plot is a simple one. A womanizing banker from Moscow seduces a young woman at the Black Sea resort of Yalta -- and then, calamitously, falls in love. The dalliance becomes an obsession for them both. They remain married to others but imprisoned by their passion for one another. The banker's name is Dmitri. He was hardly the last Russian to lose his wits in Crimea.

The latest is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the president of Russia and, if I may say so, a real dummy. By taking one stupid step after another, he has managed to let much of Ukraine slip from the Russian orbit -- to which, if the Ukrainians have anything to say about, it will never return. Putin can pound his chest all he wants, but the sound emitted is just plain tinny.

Putin's first mistake was to not acknowledge that Russia is -- to resurrect what was once said about the Ottoman Empire -- the sick man of Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, it has lost much of its empire -- all of the old Eastern Europe satellites (Hungary, Poland, etc.) and even countries that Moscow had swallowed whole, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for example. It has become a corrupt petrostate. Oil fuels the economy and alcohol fuels the population. The U.S. GDP per capita was $52,800 in 2012. Russia's was $18,000.

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Nonetheless, Putin leaned on Ukraine to reject an agreement with the European Union and turn to Moscow instead. He succeeded, but this is precisely where things started to fall apart. Instead of merely accepting the reality that the western half of Ukraine is already oriented with Europe, he used muscle -- and a $15 billion loan -- to keep Kiev beholden to Russia. Demonstrators took to the streets, the pro-Moscow Ukrainian government used deadly force and the government was toppled. Putin's guy, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was last seen in Russia itself. Soon he'll be rooming with Edward Snowden.

It is tempting to talk, as The Financial Times has, of a "second Cold War." This is nonsense. The current crisis is neither an ideological battle nor, even, a tug of war between two competing empires. It is, instead, a revival of the old European game of jostling nationalisms. In Ukraine, Russian speakers do not want to take orders from Ukrainian speakers. In Europe, these matters have usually been settled by ethnic cleansing or population transfers. Putin's preferred method is to effectively annex the Russian-speaking Crimea to Russia itself -- welcome home, Yalta.

Putin cannot go unpunished. He must be made to pay an economic price and, to the extent possible, be isolated. But reality is sobering. Russia can occupy both Crimea and eastern Ukraine if it so chooses. It has the manpower and it's right on the spot. In realpolitik, as in real estate, location is often all that matters.

Still, Putin has badly played his hand. He lost his influence in much of Ukraine and won, really, what he already effectively had -- Crimea. While there, he should wander down to the esplanade where on a summer's day Chekhov's Dmitri spied a lady with a dog. It was an easy seduction -- followed, as it will be with Putin's, by a lifetime of anguish.